Blogging sure has changed in its Silver Age

The slick rise of "the professionals" and what comes next

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

To say that we live in a Silver Age of blogging is to steal a metaphor from comic books. For they too had their own Golden Age (the ~1940s-50s)—which is where most of the original ideas and characters came from, names like Superman, Batman, etc. This was succeeded by a Silver Age (~1960s-70s) which saw the rise of quality stories and narratives. This, in turn, was followed up by a just-okay Bronze age as it all became repetitive, until that staleness ended in the mid-to-late 80s with new series or changes to characters that did feel like true innovations again. Publications like Watchmen, the Lovecraftian Swamp Thing, or the brutal The Dark Knight Returns represented a novel “modern turn,” one attributable mostly to a handful of brilliant writers like Frank Miller and Alan Moore.

In other words, to say we are in a Silver Age of blogging is merely to say that there is now a large amount of high-quality content being produced by a second generation of online writers, but also that most “innovation” you see is merely the formalization and professionalization of what came before.

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And certainly, professionalism has its upsides. It’s what allows for more complicated “plots” (here, more well-produced essayistic narratives). The graphics (here, sometimes graphs) are better. The aesthetics (here, writing) is more consistent. In the Silver Age of blogging, writers online know what they are doing. There’s a certain slickness to the whole thing.

But, just like in the Silver Age of comics, it’s a slickness that belies a lack of true innovation. Most everything you read online now represents only improvements in minor qualities. So far, there’s no Alan Moore driving the form to new heights. Writers simply, boringly, know what “plots” work, how to write something catchy, how to produce large amounts of content quickly, and where to place the paywall.